Beverages, acting, gambling and inheritance are just some of the sources of income of the top female earners.

Top of the list is Kirsten Rausing, boasting a fortune of £12.1bn ($14.65bn). This is a decrease of £156m from last year.

Her aunt Marit has also become one of the UK’s richest women through inheritance, after the death of her husband Hans left her and her family with a net worth of £9.6bn. She is third on the list and the UK’s wealthiest new entrant.

Charlene de Carvalho-Heineken, who has a controlling stake in the world’s second-largest brewer, is worth £10.3bn. A haul big enough to crown her as the UK’s second richest woman. Despite this, she has lost around £1.7bn since last year’s list was released.

Songwriter and former Miss UK Kirsty Bertarelli boasts an £9.2bn fortune, coming in fourth on the list, while gambling mogul Denise Coates is fifth.

At the end of last year it was reported that Coates’ was awarded a pay day of £323m in 2019. The sum is the highest amount paid to a chief executive of a British company and breaks the previous record of £265m set by Coates a year earlier.

She is worth £7.2bn, and has increased her wealth by £310m over the past year.

Salma Hayek and Baroness Howard de Walden are sixth and seventh, each having amassed £6.6bn and £4.3bn respectively. Hayek married French billionaire François-Henri Pinault, while de Walden inherited hers from her father’s vast London property empire.

Leonie Schroder, whose family owns 48% of the asset management company Schroders, comes in at number eight, managing her own inherited wealth of £4bn.

Carrie Perrodo’s £3.4bn wealth is derived from oil group Perenco, while tenth on the list – Harriet Heyman – gleaned her wealth from her husband Michael Moritz, a partner at Sequoia Capital.

Other notable women on the list include Elisabeth Murdoch. She increased her wealth by more than £1bn to £1.2bn since the last report. Media tycoon Rupert Murdoch’s six children split the spoils of the sale of 21st Century Fox to Disney, with a windfall of $12bn in cash and shares between them last year.

She is not in the top ten, but sits ninth on the Sunday Times’ list of the richest female entrepreneurs.

Pop sensation Rihanna is also on the list, and is reportedly worth £468m.

More than £54bn has been wiped off the UK’s most well off since the coronavirus pandemic hit.